Photos.app – Forcing iPhoto to Download New Photos in Photo Stream

iphotophoto-stream

I'm listing some items for sale online, and have taken a bunch of pictures with my iPhone. About half-way through the process, iPhoto '11 stopped downloading new photos into its local Photo Stream. I've quit iPhoto and re-opened it. I've gone into the Photos app on my iPhone and confirmed all the pictures are there.

Is this normal behavior? Is there any way to tell iPhoto to download my pictures?

Best Answer

I have found a better way. One that doesn't involve resync'ing the entire stream.

  1. Quit iPhoto
  2. Open up Activity Monitor
  3. In the search field enter: photostreamagent
  4. Select all the PhotoStreamAgent processes listed
  5. Click the Quit Process button
  6. In the confirmation dialog that pops up click the Quit button
  7. Confirm that all the PhotoStreamAgent processes are no longer alive by waiting for the Activity Monitor window to show no processes with that name
  8. Re-start iPhoto

When you restart iPhoto it will re-start the PhotoStreamAgent process for your iPhoto session and kick off a new Photo Stream sync. You'll get your lastest pictures updated and you won't have to sit through a full re-sync of all your Photo Stream.

Activity Monitor

Update for Yosemite where the process name has changed to iCloud Photos. This is the what you want to kill:

Activity Monitor

Update for Yosemite 10.10.4 where the process name has changed to Photos Agent. This what you want to kill:

Activity Monitor

You can also do this, quickly, from the command line like so:

sudo pkill cloudphotosd
sudo killall cloudphotosd
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